Already one of the longest paved runways in the world, it had been specially extended in the late 1980s in a move that supported the widely held view in the "stealth-watcher" community that a very high-speed aircraft was under test at Area 51. Couple this with the unmarked charter planes and buses with their windows blacked out that were ferrying up to 4,000 workers in and out of the base from Los Angeles and Las Vegas every week and word soon got around that Area 51 was as busy as it had ever been in its 40-year history — ever since, in fact, Kelly Johnson, the Skunk Works' founder, brought the U-2 here for testing in the mid-1950s.
But alongside the stealth-watchers, another set of pilgrims regularly made the trip to Tikaboo Valley. Many of these people had been drawn to Area 51 by the revelations of a man named Robert Lazar, who in 1989 claimed to have worked on recovered alien spacecraft at a site adjacent to Area 51 known as S-4. While Lazar's claims seemed wild, his followers consistently reported sightings of strange orbs of light over the base; objects that seemed to defy the way aircraft — even the top secret variety at Groom Lake — ought to fly.
But tread the fine line between the world of black programs and the world of UFOs and you entered another minefield of disinformation.
In 1997, the CIA admitted in a set of released documents that it had encouraged reports of flying saucers in the 1950s and 1960s to obscure the flight trials of its then top secret U-2 and A-12 spyplanes. The implication was that if you saw one of these things overflying the highway and reported it, there was something wrong with your reasoning. It was a tactic that worked well.
Add this to the highly compartmentalized, watertight environment in which black program engineers and scientists worked, and the fear they were reportedly subjected to, and here, as with the Philadelphia Experiment, was a cheap, but highly effective means of maintaining program secrecy. By the cusp of the millennium, there was so much bad information mixed in with the good about black programs that it was often impossible to tell them apart. Was Astra another case in point? On my return from California I'd left a message on Marckus' answering machine. Maybe, I'd conceded, talking to the machine like it was a confessional, I had been expressly meant to see that chart. Maybe Astra was a subtle piece of disinformation; a misleading fragment planted ahead of my visit. Then again, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was genuine.
Faced as I was with the official denial, Astra was every bit as effective as a hit team equipped with Colt Commandos and a platinum hard-key. Less messy, too.
This time, Marckus had called me back. I told him then what I thought of his wild-goose chase. He never attempted to deny it. I got the impression he truly believed it was good for me, like it was an extension of my education or something.
In the small hours of a particularly hot night, three days after I'd sat in Muellner's office, I watched from my mountaintop lookout as a ball of shining golden light rose above the hills that separated Groom Lake from Tikaboo Valley. The light appeared to hang in the air for a few moments before drifting lazily downrange and disappearing behind a mountain peak 50 miles to the south. It left me strangely unmoved. In the kind of silence that you can shred with a razor when you're a hundred miles from anywhere, I found myself thinking again about the memo from Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining, head of the U.S. Army Air Forces' Air Materiel Command, to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, chief of USAAF intelligence in September 1947. The memo I'd spilled coffee over in my basement back in London.
Twining's observation — that objects "approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft" were neither "visionary nor fictitious" — was written just three months after the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947: the period that most people tout as the real start of the modern UFO sightings era.
What was it that Twining had written? That it was possible, "within the present U.S. knowledge — provided extensive detailed development is undertaken — to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles at subsonic speeds."
In mid-August 1945, I recalled, too, that 300 railroad freight cars of V-2 components captured in the European theater of operations had trundled westward across the wilderness from the Gulf of Mexico to the Organ Mountains, deep inside the dry, desert hinterland. Every railroad siding from El Paso, Texas, to Belen, New Mexico, a distance of 210 miles, had been seen to be full of cars all headed for the White Sands Proving Ground, 125 miles to the west of Roswell. Following on behind them were approximately 40 captured German scientists recruited under the covert selection program known as "Operation Paperclip." They were led by Wernher von Braun.
Maybe Roswell had happened, maybe it hadn't. But if something had come down in that summer of 1947, something extraterrestrial, there was no definitive proof, more than half a century later, to say that what had crashed there was alien; and dozens, if not hundreds of researchers had sought to discover the truth about it.
But if Roswell's extraterrestrial dimension was simply a piece of fiction, then why not turn the thing around, look a little to the left or the right, and see what swam into focus.
When I looked at Roswell this way, I saw the White Sands Proving Ground. And then I saw something else.
The V-2 rocket program had started under the aegis of the German Army, the Wehrmacht, but had been transferred in the final stages of the war on Hitler's orders to a higher authority: Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. The same had been true of the Me 262 jet fighter and just about every other German high-tech weapons program. Most of them had started under Luftwaffe control and then migrated in the same direction. In short, anything that had shown any real promise as a weapon system — in particular, anything that appeared to represent a quantum leap over the then state of the art — had ended up under the oversight of the SS.
Eight thousand feet above sea level, I felt a constriction in my throat. I was so keyed up, my breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. But the thoughts kept on tumbling. Just as it seemed I'd been wrong in trying to connect antigravity with the USAF, so I realized, in a moment of clarity, I'd made the same mistake in Germany. What had Lusty actually stood for? Luftwaffe Secret Technology. In looking for evidence of an antigravity program in the raw intelligence reports of Project Lusty, had I been heading up a blind alley? If antigravity had been developed by the Nazis, then perhaps it hadn't been under Luftwaffe control at all, but that of the SS.
I called Marckus from a public phone in a windswept diner just after I turned off the Extraterrestrial Highway for Vegas. I told him the conclusions I'd reached and that the available clues said I should take another look at Germany.
"I think you're making a mistake," Marckus said. "If anyone has cracked it, it's the Americans. Stay in the States, use your contacts, go deeper."
I neglected to tell him that, thanks to his field test which showed that my research in the U.S. was merely duplicating his knowledge, I'd wasted enough time already.
Chapter 15
In the reading room of London's Imperial War Museum, under a skylight battered by autumn winds and icy rain, I immersed myself in books and papers that plotted the SS's gradual takeover of the German aerospace and weapons industry in the last two years of the war. But as the evidence mounted, I found myself increasingly distracted by thoughts of Marckus. Why had he warned me off the German research angle? Why did Marckus, with his incisive mind and razor-sharp reasoning, insist on belittling information that seemed more beguiling by the hour?